Annealing atmosphere effect on the resistive switching and magnetic properties of spinel Co3O4 thin films prepared by a sol–gel technique. Issue 22 (23rd April 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Yao, Chuangye; Ismail, Muhammad; Hao, Aize; Thatikonda, Santhosh Kumar; Huang, Wenhua; Qin, Ni; Bao, Dinghua
• Is Part Of: RSC advances. Volume 9:Issue 22(2019)
• Page Start: 12615
• Page End: 12625
• Publication Date: 2019-04-23
• Subjects: Chemistry -- Periodicals; 540.5
• DOI: 10.1039/c9ra01121h
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2046-2069

Abstract

Abstract : The resistive switching and magnetic properties can be enhanced by controlling oxygen vacancies via the annealing atmosphere effect. Abstract : Spinel Co3 O4 thin films were synthesized using a sol–gel technique to study the annealing atmosphere effect on resistive switching (RS) and magnetic modulation properties. Compared with oxygen and air annealed Pt/Co3 O4 /Pt stacks, the nitrogen annealed Pt/Co3 O4 /Pt stack shows optimal switching parameters such as a lower forming voltage, uniform distribution of switching voltages, excellent cycle-to-cycle endurance (>800 cycles), and good data retention. Improvement in switching parameters is ascribed to the formation of confined conducting filaments (CFs) which are composed of oxygen vacancies. From the analysis of current–voltage characteristics and their temperature dependence, the carrier transport mechanism in the high-field region of the high resistance state was dominated by Schottky emission. Besides, temperature dependent resistance and magnetization variations revealed that the physical mechanism of RS can be explained based on the formation and rupture of oxygen vacancy based CFs. In addition, multilevel saturation magnetization under different resistance states is attributed to the variation of oxygen vacancy concentration accompanied with the changes in the valence state of cations. Results suggested that using a nitrogen annealing atmosphere to anneal the thin films is a feasible approach to improve RS parameters and enhance the magnetic properties of Co3 O4 thin film, which shows promising applications to design multifunctional electro-magnetic coupling nonvolatile memory devices.